The Forgotten Founder

In 1635, Roger Williams was appointed to pastoral duties at the local
church in Salem, Mass. Williams, a Puritan preacher who had fled religious
persecution in England, was already unpopular in Boston for rebuking
civil authorities who seized lands owned by Native Americans, but he
promptly waded into another controversy.

Massachusetts' General Court, the governing authority at the time, required
all males over the age of 16 to swear an oath of allegiance to the king
of England, ending with "so help me, God."

Most people didn't see a problem with that. Williams did. To him, the
state's use of God's name in a civil oath was far from innocuous. What
about the atheists, he argued? Would they be forced to take the oath
as well?

"A magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man," insisted
Williams. Doing so, he contended, would force the non-believer "to take
the name of God in vain."

Williams' stand irked civil authorities. That was bad enough, but he
didn't stop there. He announced that civil officials should have no authority
in religious matters. Williams asserted that government officials should
stick to enforcing the "second tablet" of the Ten Commandments, which
deals mainly with non-religious offenses such as murder, lying and stealing,
and leave enforcement of the "first tablet," which lists religious decrees,
to the clergy.

Such views were more than just unusual in mid-17th century America they
were heretical. On July
8, 1635, Williams was summoned before the General Court, warned that
his views were "erroneous and very dangerous" and basically told to shut
up.

Williams did the opposite. In a series of letters to church officials
in Boston, he protested his treatment at the hands of the General Court
and continued to spread his "erroneous" opinions, daring to assert that
his views on religion should be of no importance to the state. On Oct.
9, he was called before the General Court again. There were to be no
more warnings.

Declared the Court, "Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of
the church at Salem, hath broached & divulged diverse new & dangerous
opinions.... It is therefore ordered, that the said Mr. Williams shall
depart out of this jurisdiction within six weeks."

The problem was, other than "this jurisdiction," there were no other
settlements in colonial America where Williams could easily relocate.
The six weeks came and went, with Williams still in town. Government
officials made plans to ship him back to England, by force if necessary.

Williams had other ideas. One January evening he left his wife and two
young children behind and fled into the wilderness. Williams, who had
spent time among Indians and spoke several of their languages, wintered
with some natives until spring. At the headwaters of the Narragansett
River, he purchased a plot of land from the Indians. Sending for his
wife and children, Williams proclaimed a new settlement. He called it "Providence."

Although no one is really certain when Williams was born, most scholars
believe it was sometime in 1603, making this year the 400th anniversary
of Williams' birth. In Rhode Island, the state Williams founded, celebrations
and observances are under way. It's a good time to consider anew the
legacy of Roger Williams.

When most Americans think of the great historical figures who pioneered
the separation of church and state, men like Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison quickly come to mind. Williams was in many ways their spiritual
grandfather and he was much more radical, especially considering the
times in which he lived.

"Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils."
- Roger Williams

"I think it's beyond dispute that he did contribute a great deal to
the tradition of religious liberty in this country," said Edwin S. Gaustad,
professor emeritus of history at the Uni\xadversity of California, Riverside,
and author of several books about Williams. "One historian said that
the major contribution of Williams is that he stands at the beginning
of our history. So the stream grows steadily from the 17th century to
the present."

Williams was definitely ahead of his time. The idea of separating religion
and government was unthinkable in the 17th century. Although the Puritans
of Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted to separate themselves from the Church
of England, which they considered corrupt, they had no intention of dividing
religion and government.

Puritan Massachusetts was in fact a theocracy. The General Court taxed
everyone to fund the Puritan Church. Only church members could vote or
hold public office. Blasphemy was a capital offense. Ministers were an\xadswer\xadable
to government authorities. Resi\xaddents could be fined, imprisoned or whipped
for breaking various religiously inspired laws.

Williams would have none of that in Rhode Island, the state he founded.
Gaustad, in his book, Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty (Oxford
University Press, 2001), writes that by 1640 nearly 40 families were
living in Providence, and they boldly declared that religious freedom
and separation of church and state would be among their guiding principles.

"We agree, As formerly hath been the liberties of the Town, so still
to hold forth Liberty of Conscience," the residents de\xadclared.

Church-state separation, Wil\xadliams argued, was essential for the health
of both the state and the church. In an ongoing exchange of letters with
Puritan minister John Cotton, Williams defended his vision for Rhode
Island. Williams asserted that there should be a "hedge or wall of Separation
between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world." When
that wall or hedge was breached, he argued, it was necessary to rebuild
it.

Wrote Williams, "[T]o restore [God's] Garden and Paradise again, it
must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto himself from the world."

(Williams' language is very similar to Jefferson's metaphor of "a wall
of separation between church and state," but there is no evidence Jefferson
knew of Williams' observations.)

Cotton was never persuaded, and it was easy for those left behind in
Massachusetts to feel good about being rid of Williams. Yet, as Gaustad
points out, Williams had the last laugh.

Noting that Williams once wrote that he would build his city near a "sweet
spring," Gaustad writes, "Although Rhode Island prospered slowly, it
hung on to become the safest refuge for liberty of conscience. Dissenters
of all stripes, persons of all religious persuasions or none, could find
sanctuary in Rhode Island. Beside that 'sweet spring,' Williams sowed
the seeds of a sweet liberty."

Williams meant what he said. Rhode Island became a haven for religious
dissenters including some that even Williams found it hard to stomach.
Wil\xadliams disliked Quakers with great intensity and he argued with
them frequently about theology but they settled unmolested in Rhode
Island. In 1657, when authorities in Massa\xadchusetts, trying to whip up
a general persecution against Qua\xadkers, wrote to government officials
in Rhode Island and asked for help in stamping them out, the colony's
General Court was blunt in its reply.

"We have no law among us whereby to punish any for only declaring...their
minds and understanding concerning the things and ways of God, as to
salvation and eternal condition," the Court advised Bay Colony authorities.

Williams had a long track record of speaking truth to power. In 1643
he penned an anonymous tract addressed to the British Parliament rebuking
them for meddling in religious affairs. Noting that England had alternatively
been officially Protestant and Catholic and that many lives had been
lost in the ensuing conflict, Williams wrote, "We query whether the blood
of so many hundred thousand Protestants, mingled with blood of so many
thousand papists be not a warning to us."

Williams' masterstroke, however, was his 1644 book The Bloudy Tenent
of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience. Williams wrote the book
during a period when he was trying to secure an official charter for
Rhode Island from England, which may have distracted him. The work
lacks cohesion, and even Gaustad has called it "long and somewhat disorganized." Nevertheless,
its thesis was startling to the 17th century mind: Williams argued
that mergers of church and state were blasphemous as well as dangerous.

In The Bloudy Tenent, Williams laid down arguments for church-state
separation that are still used today: that government officials are not
competent judges of religious truth, that forcing people to take part
in religion against their will lessens genuine interest in faith and
that religious freedom which Williams called "soul liberty" was not
a favor to be granted by the state but a God-given right.

Embracing a vision that went far beyond his contemporaries, Williams
insisted that religious freedom must extend to all, not just Christians.
He proclaimed religious liberty the birthright of everyone, "paganish,
Jewish, Turk\xadish, or anti-christian." He even asked readers to consider
that if Jesus returned to Earth, he would not use force to persuade anyone
but would rely instead on love and moral persuasion. A true Christian
church, Williams argued, could never persecute anyone.

In the book, Williams traced the development of Christian history through
the ages. He asserted that the 4th-century Roman emperor Constantine
the Great, who favored Christianity with state subsidies and support,
actually damaged Christianity and put the church on the wrong path. Church
and state, Williams argued, were still reaping Constantine's bitter harvest
1,200 years later. It was time, Williams wrote, to tear asunder that
which Constantine had joined. It was time to separate church and state.

Church and state, Williams asserted, serve different functions and play
different roles. He endorsed the idea that Christians must obey civil
rulers but only in civil matters. In religious matters, he maintained,
the believer must rely on the commands of his own conscience.

Any other system, Williams believed, led to oppression, war and death. The
Bloudy Tenent is indeed a bloody book, as Williams speaks graphically
of those who suffered and died in Europe's religious wars.

"Who can but run with zeal inflamed to prevent the deflowering of chaste
souls, and spilling the blood of the innocent?" he wrote. He asked readers
if it was just to ignore the "fearful cries" of thousands of "men, women,
children, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, old and
young, high and low, plundered, ravished, slaughtered, murdered, famished?"

Williams' critics were not impressed. In England, Parl\xadiament banned
the book and ordered all copies burned. In Massachusetts, Cotton was
so incensed he wrote a reply, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made
White in the Bloud of the Lamb. In his response, Cotton took the
common 17th-century view that complete religious liberty was dangerous.
Allowing theological heresy could bring down the social order, Cotton
argued. Only a fanatic would advocate such a thing.

Williams fired back in 1652 by publishing a type of sequel, The
Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy: By Mr. Cotton's Endeavor to Wash it
White in the Blood of the Lambe. In this tome, Williams rebutted
the charge that society would collapse if religious freedom were extended,
pointing to the example of Holland, which had extended toleration to
all and prospered. He compared freedom of religion to a ship at sea
and called state religious persecution a "notorious and common Pirate" that
lays waste to the "Con\xadsciences of all men, of all sorts, of all Religions
and Persuasions whatsoever."

Although his style cannot be called graceful, Williams was a prolific
writer all of his life and was not afraid to use blunt language. He once
called government attempts to enforce religious conformity "spiritual
rape." On another occasion, he wrote, "Forced worship stincks in God's
nostrils."

In one of his most famous missives, Williams in 1655 attempted to explain
to the residents of Providence the need for a division between religion
and government.

At the time, Williams was serving as president of Providence. It's unclear
why he wrote the letter, but apparently some inter-religious tensions
had riled the community; Williams sought to calm them.

Williams likened the colony to a ship at sea whose passengers include "Papist
and Protestants, Jews and Turks." The voyage would go more smoothly,
Williams asserted, if "none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews and Turks
be forced to come to the Ship's Prayers or Worship; nor, secondly, compelled
from their own particular Prayers or Worship, if they practice any."

The captain of the ship, like the head of a state, had an obligation
to keep the civil peace among the passengers, Williams wrote.

"[T]he Commander of this Ship," he insisted, "ought to command the Ship's
course; yea, and also to command that Justice, Peace, and Sobriety, be
kept and practiced, both among the Seamen and all the Passengers." In
religion, Williams asserted, a person may be a law unto himself but
that right did not extend to a citizen's dealings with civil government.

Williams' words failed to end the squabbling and two years later Williams,
perhaps weary of the infighting, stepped down as president of Providence.
He spent many of his later years resolving land disputes over the boundaries
of Rhode Island and acting as a negotiator between the colonists and
hostile Indians. He died early in 1683 the exact date is unknown and
was buried in a hillside near his home in Providence.

In England, Parliament banned Williams' book and ordered
all copies burned.

What made Williams such a forceful advocate for church-state separation
and religious liberty? Perhaps a clue can be found in his own restless
search for religious truth. Although he started as a Puritan, Williams
left that faith community in 1638 after rejecting the practice of infant
baptism and helped a small band of Baptists in Providence establish the
first Baptist church in America.

But Williams did not remain a Baptist for long. Just a few months later,
he quit that church too. Williams came to believe that humankind would
not know the "true church" until Jesus returned to earth. He studied
the Bible and engaged in theological debates all of his life but never
found another church to call home.

It took some time for Williams' reputation as a champion of religious
liberty to emerge. In 1702, Puritan preacher Cotton Mather wrote a religious
history of New England that portrayed Williams as a dangerous fanatic.
Seventy-five years later, another minister, Isaac Backus of Massachusetts,
set about to rescue Williams' reputation.

Backus, like Williams, was an advocate of church-state separation and
complete religious liberty. In 1777, Backus published his own religious
history of New England that praised Williams as a visionary and a principled
man. Backus had done extensive research, even collecting original letters
by Williams. He also put Williams' philosophy into action, blasting church
taxes and agitating for adoption of amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution
guaranteeing religious liberty.

The debate over Williams went on after the American Revolution. In 1834,
historian George Bancroft wrote a history of the United States that portrayed
Williams in a favorable light. Not everyone was persuaded. President
John Quincy Adams felt that Bancroft's history reflected poorly on his
home state of Massachusetts. Calling Williams "a polemical porcupine," Adams
asserted that Williams' refusal to swear the oath of the General Court
was "seditious."

Nevertheless, Williams' reputation continued to grow. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, more scholarly works on Williams and colonial
history appeared. These later books, free from the sectarian axe-grinding
that had colored earlier works, presented a more balanced portrait of
the man.

Still, not all historians were convinced of Williams' value. One, writing
in 1950, asserted that Williams had "exerted little or no influence" on
developments in America. Church-state scholar Leo Pfeffer strongly disagreed.
In his Church, State and History (1953), widely regarded as
the definitive work on the subject, Pfeffer asserted that Williams was
far ahead of his time and said his ideas "represent the great contribution
of American democracy to civilization."

Gaustad notes that from a historical perspective, Williams lacks the
verve of Jefferson and the intellectual firepower of Madison. Those men,
who lived during a time of great upheaval and helped shape the nation,
captured the American imagination in ways Williams never did.

"He could use better public relations, that's certainly true," said
Gaustad. "The Baptists have tried to keep his reputation going, but there
isn't really a vested interest group that has taken him as their great
cause. Jefferson and Madison lived in the midst of the Revolution and
the Constitution. To most people, what happened 160 years before that
must have been irrelevant."

Williams' contribution was recognized, if belatedly, even in Massachusetts
where in 1936, legislators apologized to Williams by passing a law rescinding
his expulsion. Three years later in Providence, a statue of Williams
was unveiled. As a nod to Williams' advocacy of religious pluralism,
a Catholic priest and a rabbi officiated at the event.

A statue of Williams also adorns the U.S. Capitol, alongside other important
figures from American history. (No contemporary artistic renditions of
Williams have survived. Although Williams appears in several etchings,
portraits and paintings, these images reflect only guesses at his appearance.)

In 1984, the U.S. National Park Service created the Roger Williams National
Memorial in Providence. Rhode Island's only national park, the facility
is located on a piece of the original settlement of Providence and includes
a 4.5-acre park, Williams' gravesite and a visitor center featuring exhibits
on religious freedom and a video presentation about the life and legacy
of Williams.

Throughout this year, the memorial is hosting special events in honor
of the 400th anniversary of Williams' birth. On May 10 and 11, it will
offer "A Bridge to the Past: A Key into Roger Williams' World" with re-enactors
in period garb who will demonstrate how settlers lived and worked in
Providence during Williams' time.

What is Williams' relevance for Americans today? Historian Gaustad said
his message is a timeless one that politicians today would do well
to bear in mind: "Government should keep its calloused hands off tender
consciences," Gaustad said. "Leave religion alone. When they try to help,
they only hurt."

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